The Emperor tries not to rush. This has to seem organic, friendly, unplanned.
‘Skinpainter doesn’t want a war, and neither, really, do you. You won’t even need to lie, much. Get yourself to the mountain, at night. To the high caves that overlook the barrows. They like to walk there most nights, and stew in their legacies. Give them the girl they expect. Naïve, uncertain. Backed into a corner. They will want to see the best in you. They always do. The bone, I suspect, is in a pouch, upon their belt. As always.’
Crowkisser’s mind catalogues the details. ‘Fine. And your revenge?’
‘That will be served when Thell falls in front of you.’
A leathered strip of an arm waves. ‘Be wary of Skinpainter. They have taken many things of great power from me. They may have taken more in the years since.’
She shrugs. ‘I’ve taken more from the people of this world than anyone. Maybe we’ll have something in common too.’
The corpse twitches. ‘That is a worry.’
She smiles. ‘Maybe for you. So, once I have the bone?’
‘Then you turn it against your father, and his power.’
She scratches at a sudden itch on her wrist. ‘Against the weaving?’
The corpse swings back and forth. ‘You know your father. If he had access to the numberless dead of my Empire, how would he use them?’
Crowkisser thinks. Scenarios flitting across her mind like flipped cards. Recoiling from some. Stunned by others. ‘He’d use them to end the threat. With minimal losses. Or what he considers minimal losses.’
The corpse’s yellow teeth gnash around its dry tongue. ‘And what is the threat?’
Her shoulders slump. ‘Me.’
‘And what could end you? No simple weaving, now. Not now you’ve sung to the dark.’
‘A composite,’ she murmurs, and suddenly, the shape of the battle to come unfolds before her. A hundred small pieces of vague prophecy, weeks of snatched scraps, suddenly flex and weave into the smooth shape of the future.
‘Exactly,’ says the Emperor of the Dead, and its skull glows green with the brightest of fires.
‘Throw the bone into the heart of the composite, and I’ll cut free every single poor soul that your father has bound. We will steal the very ground from under him. And I shall open the mountain to you. You will finally be able to see the world as it should be.’
Crowkisser bites her lip, ‘Without my father …’
‘Only Skinpainter and Belltoller could stand against you. I know this. You cannot kill your father, but you can kill them.’
‘Slickwalker,’ she mutters.
‘A few clean shots from that beautiful gun,’ the Emperor replies. ‘Belltoller’s skull is as weak as any other, if caught unprepared.’
‘And Skinpainter?’ she asks.
‘Mine,’ the corpse snarls. ‘Mine. In payments of debts long due. Do we have a deal?’
Crowkisser thinks for a moment. Her bones are numb with the driving rain, her skin’s beaten blue by the wind. And down the path in Astic, the first lamps of evening kindle.
She clasps the dead man’s hand in her own.
‘We do.’
49
It is dangerous, to look at the smoke, and imagine the light
dangerous to look at the shell, and imagine a fruit within.
